Proposed District Cooling Plant for the British University in Egypt Campus

Egypt suffers from a major shortage in the produced electrical energy compared to local energy consumption. In order to solve the electricity crisis in Egypt, there must be alternatives to the traditional electric systems, which will reduce the electrical consumption significantly. One of those solutions is the district cooling concept. District cooling plant is proposed to be constructed at the British University in Egypt to serve the main seven buildings of the university campus. The current cooling system installed in the campus is composing of Direct Expansion (DX) splits and air handling units for all the university buildings, except for the main auditorium building which is supplied by chilled water from three reciprocating chillers. The current system cooling capacity is found to be 1882.3 TR which is resulted from combining the nominal value for each installed DX unit and for each chiller capacity. However, the proposed district cooling plant shows great reduction in the cooling load required as proved from comprehensive calculations using the hourly analysis program (HAP) that the total coincident load of the proposed plant has found to be 1284.6 TR. The proposed primary cooling plant composes of three centrifugal chillers which is considered to be the most convenient chiller configuration for the university premises due to the variable cooling load, low part load and unavailability of natural gas pipelines needed for some other chillers type such as absorption chillers.